Why Both the Left and Right Have Got It Wrong on Ukraine

Slavoj Žižek

There's a historical irony in watching Ukrainians tearing down Lenin’s statues as a sign of their will to break with Soviet domination.

Again and again in television coverage of the mass protests in Kiev against the Yanukovich government, we saw images of protesters tearing down statues of Lenin. It was an easy way to demonstrate anger: the statues functioned as a symbol of Soviet oppression, and Vladimir Putin's Russia is perceived as continuing the Soviet policy of domination of its neighbours.

Bear in mind that it was only in 1956 that Lenin's statues started to proliferate throughout the Soviet Union: until then, statues of Stalin were much more common. But after Krushchev's "secret" denunciation of Stalin at the 20th congress of the Communist party, Stalin's statues were replaced en masse by Lenin's: Lenin was literally a stand-in for Stalin.

This was made equally clear by a change made in 1962 to the masthead of Pravda. Until then, at the top left-hand corner of the front page there had been a drawing of two profiles, Lenin and Stalin, side by side. Shortly after the 22nd congress publicly rejected Stalin his profile wasn't merely removed but replaced with a second profile of Lenin: now there were two identical Lenins printed side by side. In a way, this weird repetition made Stalin more present in his absence than ever.

There was nonetheless a historical irony in watching Ukrainians tearing down Lenin's statues as a sign of their will to break with Soviet domination and assert their national sovereignty. For the golden era of Ukrainian national identity was not tsarist Russia - where Ukrainian national self-assertion was thwarted - but the first decade of the Soviet Union, when Soviet policy in a Ukraine exhausted by war and famine was "indigenisation". Ukrainian culture and language were revived and rights to healthcare, education and social security introduced.

Indigenisation followed the principles formulated by Lenin in quite unambiguous terms:

"The proletariat cannot but fight against the forcible retention of the oppressed nations within the boundaries of a given state, and this is exactly what the struggle for the right of self-determination means. The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that 'its own' nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible."

Lenin remained faithful to this position to the end: immediately after the October Revolution, when Rosa Luxembourg argued that small nations should be given full sovereignty only if progressive forces would predominate in the new state, Lenin was in favour of an unconditional right to secede.

In his last struggle against Stalin's project for a centralised Soviet Union, Lenin again advocated the unconditional right of small nations to secede (in this case, Georgia was at stake), insisting on the full sovereignty of the national entities that composed the Soviet state - no wonder that, on 27 September 1922, in a letter to the Politburo, Stalin accused Lenin of "national liberalism". The direction in which Stalin was already heading is clear from his proposal that the government of Soviet Russia should also be the government of the other five republics (Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia):

"If the present decision is confirmed by the Central Committee of the RCP, it will not be made public, but communicated to the Central Committees of the Republics for circulation among the Soviet organs, the Central Executive Committees or the Congresses of the Soviets of the said Republics before the convocation of the All-Russian Congress of the Soviets, where it will be declared to be the wish of these Republics."

The interaction of the higher authority, the Central Committee, with its base was thus abolished: the higher authority now simply imposed its will. To add insult to injury, the Central Committee decided what the base would ask the higher authority to enact, as if it were its own wish.

In the most conspicuous case, in 1939 the three Baltic states asked to join the Soviet Union - which granted their wish. In all this Stalin was returning to pre-Revolutionary tsarist policy: Russia's colonisation of Siberia in the 17th century and Muslim Asia in the 19th was no longer condemned as imperialist expansion but celebrated for setting these traditional societies on the path of progressive modernisation.

Putin's foreign policy is a clear continuation of the tsarist-Stalinist line. After the Russian Revolution, according to Putin, the Bolsheviks did serious damage to Russia's interests:

"The Bolsheviks, for a number of reasons - may God judge them - added large sections of the historical south of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic make-up of the population, and today these areas form the south-east of Ukraine."

No wonder Stalin's portraits are on show again at military parades and public celebrations, while Lenin has been obliterated. In an opinion poll carried out in 2008 by the Rossiya TV station, Stalin was voted the third greatest Russian of all time, with half a million votes. Lenin came in a distant sixth. Stalin is celebrated not as a Communist but as a restorer of Russian greatness after Lenin's anti-patriotic "deviation". Putin recently used the term Novorossiya (New Russia) for the seven south-eastern oblasts of Ukraine, resuscitating a term last used in 1917.

But the Leninist undercurrent, though repressed, persisted in the Communist underground opposition to Stalin. Long before Solzhenitsyn, as Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2011:

"The crucial questions about the Gulag were being asked by left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to CLR. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been somewhat written out of history (they expected far worse than that, and often received it)."

This internal dissent was a natural part of the Communist movement, in clear contrast to fascism. "There were no dissidents in the Nazi party," Hitchens went on, "risking their lives on the proposition that the Führer had betrayed the true essence of National Socialism."

Precisely because of this tension at the heart of the Communist movement, the most dangerous place to be at the time of the 1930s purges was at the top of the nomenklatura: in the space of a couple of years, 80% of the Central Committee and the Red Army leadership was shot.

Another sign of dissent could be detected in the last days of "really existing socialism", when protesting crowds sang official songs, including national anthems, to remind the powers of their unfulfilled promises. In the GDR, by contrast, between the early 1970s and 1989, to sing the national anthem in public was a criminal offence: its words ("Deutschland einig Vaterland" - Germany, the united Fatherland) didn't fit with the idea of East Germany as a new socialist nation.

The resurgence of Russian nationalism has caused certain historical events to be rewritten. A recent biopic, Andrei Kravchuk's Admiral, celebrates the life of Aleksandr Kolchak, the White commander who governed Siberia between 1918 and 1920. But it's worth remembering the totalitarian potential, as well as the outright brutality, of the White counter-revolutionary forces during this period.

Had the Whites won the civil war, Hitchens writes, "the common word for fascism would have been a Russian one, not an Italian one … Major General William Graves, who commanded the American expeditionary force during the 1918 invasion of Siberia (an event thoroughly airbrushed from all American textbooks), wrote in his memoirs about the pervasive, lethal anti-Semitism that dominated the Russian right-wing and added: 'I doubt if history will show any country in the world during the last 50 years where murder could be committed so safely, and with less danger of punishment, than in Siberia during the reign of Admiral Kolchak.'"

The entire European neo-fascist right (in Hungary, France, Italy, Serbia) firmly supports Russia in the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, giving the lie to the official Russian presentation of the Crimean referendum as a choice between Russian democracy and Ukrainian fascism. The events in Ukraine - the massive protests that toppled Yanukovich and his gang - should be understood as a defence against the dark legacy resuscitated by Putin.

The protests were triggered by the Ukrainian government's decision to prioritise relations with Russia over integration into the European Union. Predictably, many anti-imperialist leftists reacted to the news by patronising the Ukrainians: how deluded they are still to idealise Europe, not to be able to see that joining the EU would just make Ukraine an economic colony of western Europe, sooner or later to go the same way as Greece.

In fact, Ukrainians are far from blind about the reality of the EU. They are fully aware of its troubles and disparities: their message is simply that their own situation is much worse. Europe may have problems, but they are a rich man's problems.

Should we, then, simply support the Ukrainian side in the conflict? There is a "Leninist" reason to do so. In Lenin's very last writings, long after he renounced the utopia of State and Revolution, he explored the idea of a modest, "realistic" project for Bolshevism.

Because of the economic under-development and cultural backwardness of the Russian masses, he argues, there is no way for Russia to "pass directly to socialism": all that Soviet power can do is to combine the moderate politics of "state capitalism" with the intense cultural education of the peasant masses - not the brainwashing of propaganda, but a patient, gradual imposition of civilised standards.

Facts and figures revealed "what a vast amount of urgent spadework we still have to do to reach the standard of an ordinary west European civilised country … We must bear in mind the semi-Asiatic ignorance from which we have not yet extricated ourselves," he wrote.

Can we think of the Ukrainian protesters' reference to Europe as a sign that their goal, too, is "to reach the standard of an ordinary western European civilised country"?

But here things quickly get complicated. What, exactly, does the "Europe" the Ukrainian protesters are referring to stand for? It can't be reduced to a single idea: it spans nationalist and even fascist elements but extends also to the idea of what Etienne Balibar calls égaliberté, freedom-in-equality, the unique contribution of Europe to the global political imaginary, even if it is in practice today mostly betrayed by European institutions and citizens themselves.

Between these two poles, there is also a naive trust in the value of European liberal-democratic capitalism. Europe can see in the Ukrainian protests its own best and worst sides, its emancipatory universalism as well as its dark xenophobia.

Let's begin with the dark xenophobia. The Ukrainian nationalist right is one instance of what is going on today from the Balkans to Scandinavia, from the US to Israel, from central Africa to India: ethnic and religious passions are exploding, and Enlightenment values receding.

These passions have always been there, lurking; what's new is the outright shamelessness of their display. Imagine a society which has fully integrated into itself the great modern axioms of freedom, equality, the right to education and healthcare for all its members, and in which racism and sexism have been rendered unacceptable and ridiculous.

But then imagine that, step by step, although the society continues to pay lip service to these axioms, they are de facto deprived of their substance.

Here is an example from very recent European history: in the summer of 2012, Viktor Orbán, the right-wing Hungarian prime minister, declared that a new economic system was needed in central Europe:

"Let us hope that God will help us and we will not have to invent a new type of political system instead of democracy that would need to be introduced for the sake of economic survival … Co-operation is a question of force, not of intention. Perhaps there are countries where things don't work that way, for example in the Scandinavian countries, but such a half-Asiatic rag-tag people as we are can unite only if there is force," he said.

The irony of these words wasn't lost on some old Hungarian dissidents: when the Soviet army moved into Budapest to crush the 1956 uprising, the message repeatedly sent by the beleaguered Hungarian leaders to the west was that they were defending Europe against the Asiatic communists. Now, after the collapse of communism, the Christian-conservative government paints as its main enemy the multicultural consumerist liberal democracy for which today's western Europe stands. Orbán has already expressed his sympathy for "capitalism with Asian values"; if the European pressure on Orbán continues, we can easily imagine him sending a message to the east: 'We are defending Asia here!'

Today's anti-immigrant populism has replaced direct barbarism with a barbarism that has a human face. It enacts a regression from the Christian ethic of "love thy neighbour" back to the pagan privileging of the tribe over the barbarian Other. Even as it represents itself as a defence of Christian values, it is in fact the greatest threat to the Christian legacy.

"Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity," GK Chesterton wrote 100 years ago, "end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church … The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them."

Doesn't the same hold for the advocates of religion too? Fanatical defenders of religion start out attacking contemporary secular culture; it's no surprise when they end up forsaking any meaningful religious experience. In a similar way, many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they end up flinging away freedom and democracy if only they may fight terror.

The "terrorists" may be ready to wreck this world for love of another, but the warriors on terror are just as ready to wreck their own democratic world out of hatred for the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalise torture to defend it. The defenders of Europe against the immigrant threat are doing much the same. In their zeal to protect the Judeo-Christian legacy, they are ready to forsake what is most important in that legacy. The anti-immigrant defenders of Europe, not the notional crowds of immigrants waiting to invade it, are the true threat to Europe.

One of the signs of this regression is a request often heard on the new European right for a more "balanced" view of the two "extremisms", the right and the left. We are repeatedly told that one should treat the extreme left (communism) the same way that Europe after the second world war treated the extreme right (the defeated fascists).

But in reality there is no balance here: the equation of fascism and communism secretly privileges fascism. Thus the right are heard to argue that fascism copied communism: before becoming a fascist, Mussolini was a socialist; Hitler, too, was a National Socialist; concentration camps and genocidal violence were features of the Soviet Union a decade before Nazis resorted to them; the annihilation of the Jews has a clear precedent in the annihilation of the class enemy, etc.

The point of these arguments is to assert that a moderate fascism was a justified response to the communist threat (a point made long ago by Ernst Nolte in his defence of Heidegger's involvement with Nazism). In Slovenia, the right is advocating the rehabilitation of the anti-communist Home Guard which fought the partisans during the second world war: they made the difficult choice to collaborate with the Nazis in order to thwart the much greater evil of communism.

Mainstream liberals tell us that when basic democratic values are under threat from ethnic or religious fundamentalists we should unite behind the liberal-democratic agenda, save what can be saved and put aside dreams of more radical social transformation.

But there is a fatal flaw in this call for solidarity: it ignores the way in which liberalism and fundamentalism are caught in a vicious cycle. It is the aggressive attempt to export liberal permissiveness that causes fundamentalism to fight back vehemently and assert itself.

When we hear today's politicians offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, and triumphantly asking the rhetorical question, "Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their rights? Do you want every critic of religion to be put to death?", what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer: who would want that?

The problem is that liberal universalism has long since lost its innocence. What Max Horkheimer said about capitalism and fascism in the 1930s applies in a different context today: those who don't want to criticise liberal democracy should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.

What of the fate of the liberal-democratic capitalist European dream in Ukraine? It isn't clear what awaits Ukraine within the EU. I've often mentioned a well-known joke from the last decade of the Soviet Union, but it couldn't be more apposite:

"Rabinovitch, a Jew, wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why, and Rabinovitch answers: 'Two reasons. The first is that I'm afraid the Communists will lose power in the Soviet Union, and the new power will put all the blame for the Communists' crimes on us, the Jews.' 'But this is pure nonsense,' the bureaucrat interrupts, 'nothing can change in the Soviet Union, the power of the Communists will last for ever!' 'Well,' Rabinovitch replies, 'that's my second reason."

Imagine the equivalent exchange between a Ukrainian and an EU administrator. The Ukrainian complains: "There are two reasons we are panicking here in Ukraine. First, we're afraid that under Russian pressure the EU will abandon us and let our economy collapse." The EU administrator interrupts: "But you can trust us, we won't abandon you. In fact, we'll make sure we take charge of your country and tell you what to do!" "Well," the Ukrainian replies, "that's my second reason."

The issue isn't whether Ukraine is worthy of Europe, and good enough to enter the EU, but whether today's Europe can meet the aspirations of the Ukrainians. If Ukraine ends up with a mixture of ethnic fundamentalism and liberal capitalism, with oligarchs pulling the strings, it will be as European as Russia (or Hungary) is today. (Too little attention is drawn to the role played by the various groups of oligarchs - the "pro-Russian" ones and the "pro-western" ones - in the events in Ukraine.)

Some political commentators claim that the EU hasn't given Ukraine enough support in its conflict with Russia, that the EU response to the Russian occupation and annexation of Crimea was half-hearted. But there is another kind of support which has been even more conspicuously absent: the proposal of any feasible strategy for breaking the deadlock.

Europe will be in no position to offer such a strategy until it renews its pledge to the emancipatory core of its history. Only by leaving behind the decaying corpse of the old Europe can we keep the European legacy of égaliberté alive. It is not the Ukrainians who should learn from Europe: Europe has to learn to live up to the dream that motivated the protesters on the Maidan. The lesson that frightened liberals should learn is that only a more radical left can save what is worth saving in the liberal legacy today.

The Maidan protesters were heroes, but the true fight - the fight for what the new Ukraine will be - is happening now, and it will be much tougher than the fight against Putin's intervention. A new and riskier heroism will be needed. It has been shown already by those Russians who oppose the nationalist passion of their own country and denounce it as a tool of power. It's time for the basic solidarity of Ukrainians and Russians to be asserted, and the very terms of the conflict rejected.

The next step is a public display of fraternity, with organisational networks established between Ukrainian political activists and the Russian opposition to Putin's regime. This may sound utopian, but it is only such thinking that can confer on the protests a truly emancipatory dimension. Otherwise, we will be left with a conflict of nationalist passions manipulated by oligarchs. Such geopolitical games are of no interest whatever to authentic emancipatory politics.

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